The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability

Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible--it's to dismantle those systems.

Plants have to eat, too,” I tried to explain. “They need nitrogen, they need minerals. You have to replace what you’re taking out. Your choices are fossil fuels or animal products.

everything is eating and then being eaten, and through it all life endures. There is no hierarchy, only hunger. And it’s through our hunger that we participate in the cosmos, in an endless cycle of life, death, and regeneration. For 98 percent of our time on Earth this was our religion.

Dr. Steven Bratman has coined the term orthorexia nervosa, a pathological fixation on eating proper food.

The author clearly yearns for food - for a life based on reciprocity, not exploitation, and he believes that plants count as partners, as participants. Having included them in the "us" of sentience and agency, he can't just take. He needs to know that he is giving back, part of a circle of exchange, instead of a one-way extraction that he identifies as death. This sentence embodies one of the impulses that is salutary in the vegetarian myth: the attempt to take humans down from our perch above and return us to our hones place in a circle. But it also reflects the ignorance. He doesn't know that apples eat, and what they eat is animals, including us. They need our excrement - the nitrogen, the minerals, the microbes - and our flesh and bones. There is a reciprocal relationship between animals and plants: predator and prey, until the prey becomes predator. It is only our attempt to remove ourselves from that circle that destroys it.

So you’re an environmentalist; why are you supporting commodities instead of food, corporate profits over local, living economies, and power over justice?

There is no place left for the buffalo to roam. There’s only corn, wheat, and soy. About the only animals that escaped the biotic cleansing of the agriculturalists are small animals like mice and rabbits, and billions of them are killed by the harvesting equipment every year. Unless you’re out there with a scythe, don’t forget to add them to the death toll of your vegetarian meal. They count, and they died for your dinner, along with all the animals that have dwindled past the point of genetic feasibility.

Inhabitants of urban industrial cultures have no point of contact with grain, chickens, cows, or, for that matter, with topsoil. We have no basis of experience to outweigh the arguments of political vegetarians. We have no idea what plants, animals, or soil eat, or how much. Which means we have no idea what we ourselves are eating.

Soil, species, rivers. That’s the death in your food. Agriculture is carnivorous: what it eats is ecosystems, and it swallows them whole.

This was not an easy book to write. For many of you, it won’t be an easy book to read. I know. I was a vegan for almost twenty years. I know the reasons that compelled me to embrace an extreme diet and they are honorable, ennobling even.

This is why militarism is a feminist issue, why rape is an environmental issue, why environmental destruction is a peace issue.